A Conversation Amongst The Animals, At The Henry Vilas Zoo

Hey, hey. Hey. Hey, polar bear. Hey!


WHAT?!?!?!?!














Do you believe in predestination?















You mean like our lives are all mapped out for us, from birth to death,
no chance to change our paths? As in are we all simply following a course
down a hill, blindly, believing that we are in control when
in fact we are merely automatons?




















Yeah.
















No.















So you believe in free will then?
















No, not really.














If you don't believe in predestination, then
doesn't that automatically mean that we have free will?





















Well?
















They aren't necessarily opposites. Or the only choices.













How can that be?
You just want to have it both ways.
Predestination presupposes a higher power, whether that be a god
or merely orderly machinations of physics, beyond our control and
pushing us around like gamepieces: we go where we must,
regardless of whether
 it is what we would prefer.

































True free will, though, posits that there are no controls on us whatsoever;
although, even if you meant 'the freedom to do what is in our
physical capacity to do,' we are never truly free, because the
universe has been shaped around us by the choices we, and every
other thing ever, have made, and as shaped, it pushes
 against us from all sides,
narrowing our options at times, 
widening them at times,
 but at every interval it is the same:
We have only so much choice as we,
acting in concert with everything that has existed to this point in time,
have allowed ourselves.


























I don't buy it. I believe in free will


















I am my own bear.















You are the bear you helped make yourself,
yes.